Godzilla may appear in the background of all the posters for Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, but there’s very much a reason that his name doesn’t appear in the title. Rather than featuring wall-to-wall creature action, the Apple TV+ series—pointedly named for the kaiju-tracking organization that appears throughout the MonsterVerse films—mainly tells what is very much a human story. Focusing on people who must live in a world that now knows giant monsters lurk in its darkest corners, Monarch is a strong reminder of the human element that so many of the MonsterVerse films sorely lack.
Monarch’s story unfolds across two main timelines: one set in the 1950s that explores the founding of Monarch, and the other in 2015, where the world is still reeling from the first appearance of Godzilla in San Francisco, which has been termed “G-day.” The 2015 timeline opens on Cate (Anna Sawai), a schoolteacher and G-day survivor, traveling to Japan to settle the affairs of her father Hiroshi, a Monarch scientist who’s disappeared and been declared dead. In the process, she discovers the existence of her half-brother, Kentaro (Watabe Ren), and a trail of Monarch secrets that lead to, among other things, the only character to appear in both timelines: Lee Shaw, played by Kurt Russell and son Wyatt Russell.
It’s a fun bit of stunt casting that doesn’t quite work. Beyond the physical resemblance, the younger Russell has a reserved presence compared to the elder Russell, who commands the screen from the moment he first appears. Out of the eight episodes provided for review, the writing does little to fill in the blanks for how he might have changed over time. There’s a similar disconnect when it comes to excitable researcher Bill Randa, played by Anders Holm, who doesn’t particularly look, sound, or act anything like John Goodman (who briefly reprises his Kong: Skull Island role in a sequence that makes rather unfortunate use of green-screen).
For all the movie-star charisma that Kurt Russell brings to the role of the older Lee, though, Monarch’s ’50s timeline—with its monster-hunting, science-focused segments—easily could have sustained a series all by itself. These scenes considerably benefit from the likable dynamic between Randa, Shaw, and Dr. Keiko Mira (Yamamoto Mari), who’s Hiroshi’s mother as well as the object of both Randa’s and Shaw’s affections. While they fight to get the titular organization off the ground, they also contend with bureaucratic meddling, as they must rely on funding from a government that will only ever see creatures like Godzilla as a threat.
By contrast, the 2015 timeline plays out as something of a globetrotting mystery, although one lacking in mystery and urgency since we get so little context for who Hiroshi is and what he wanted. When Monarch agents aren’t conveniently popping in and out of the plot, much of the drama stems from contrived squabbling whenever one character or another complains that they don’t feel like going wherever they will end up going before the episode is over.
The best moments in the series are the ones in which it slows down to explore its settings and the history of its main characters. In doing so, the race around the world becomes both snappier and fraught with tension. At one point, we glimpse ads for bunkers and missiles at the ready in the middle of one city, and elsewhere we see people living in FEMA housing outside of San Francisco’s ruins. In such moments, Monarch makes you feel the human toll of the creatures’ rampage and nudges the franchise tentatively in the right direction.
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